Field of the Invention
This disclosure pertains in general to the field of medical control devices for defining a medical ventilator protocol.
Description of the Prior Art
It is well known that medical ventilators of today are reliable machines that have high requirements on its use and operation due to their critical interaction with a patient. The operation of the ventilator during use with the patient connected to it is secured by a protocol established by the ventilator manufacture. Each protocol is an established and verified step-by-step implementation on how the ventilator should function when running specific ventilator tasks in relation to the patient.
This means that once the manufacturer has decided on the protocol and the protocol is implemented in the ventilator it takes a lot of work for the manufacturer to change or add a new protocol to the ventilator. For example, if a medical doctor or doctors would want to try a new procedure or finds implications for a better procedure (protocol) to a certain situation, the manufacturer would like to have evidence that supports a change or an addition of a new protocol due to the burden for the manufacturer to implement the protocol in the medical ventilator. Such evidence is often acquired through a clinical trial which in turn takes a long time to complete. Thus, acquiring the evidence for the new procedure takes long time and after the trial it is still not certain that the ventilator manufacturer would like to change or add the protocol.
Another drawback with today's medical ventilators is that the protocols are most often not suitable for all patients. For example, there are many different ways of weaning and titrating and some of them are better suited for some patients than other patients. There are also some protocols which are better suited for some parts of the world than others due to physical differences of the patients and to get a global acceptance of a protocol that suits most people in the world thus takes a very long time.
A further drawback is that there are many protocols that require hospital personnel to be present and takes a long time to run, such as a PEEP titration. Such long run time protocols in combination with the very limited time that the hospital personnel have available to spend with the patient are contributing to increased stress for the hospital personnel and/or adds economic burden to the hospital when the need for more personnel to be hired is increased in order to maintain the patient safety at a ventilator department at the hospital.
Hence, an improved medical ventilator allowing for faster implementation of new protocols would be beneficial.